Will Bezos be good for journalism?

Will Jeff Bezos destroy The Washington Post, or rescue the entire struggling business of journalism? Those are both very real possibilities raised by the Amazon mogul’s purchase of The Washington Post, a development that stunned the journalism world this week and set a million keyboards typing the latest round of thumb-suckers on the future of media.

Bezos clearly expects to do something dramatic. He’s putting $250 million of his own money into the company. Of course, his net worth is somewhere around $28 billion, including about $1.7 billion in cash and other assets that he can use for investing. This won’t hurt him much.

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He has never shown an interest in owning a newspaper company before. It’s not one of his quirky interests, like building a thousand-year clock or creating a space exploration company called Blue Origin. These are Rich Man’s Toys. He makes those investments because he loves science fiction, wants to be a futurist — and even wants to colonize space to save humanity.

Online retailing is his real business, the place where he makes his name and his money. So why get into the news business now? Here’s a guess: because he wants to create a new business center for Amazon.com. This purchase represents a real opportunity for Bezos to expand Amazon’s horizons here on Earth.

Of course, it’s Bezos himself, not Amazon, that will own The Washington Post. There will, however, most likely be a connection. He can learn about the publishing business from the Post and try to figure out how to turn it back into a profitable business, most likely by getting Amazon involved in collecting revenues.

I have a few reservations about this. I’m always concerned when a news organization is owned by a company — or the CEO of a company — that is not dedicated to publishing. Tycoons don’t always have the right dedication to journalism standards: to impartiality, to getting the story right (but then, some publishing companies don’t, either). Producing the news is not just another business. It’s an important part of any democracy. It keeps the public informed, helps it decide how to vote in elections, exposes corruption and digs up important information that governments and corporations would rather keep private, to the detriment of the public at large.

Jeff Bezos is a very secretive man. He rarely gives interviews or discusses what Amazon is up to. Publications write articles about Amazon’s fights with retailers and book publishers, the company’s alleged mistreatment of warehouse workers and other lower-echelon employees, and its battles with Apple (in which the U.S. Justice Department has gotten involved). Throughout all this, there is rarely a comment from Bezos or Amazon.

We in the press know that Bezos manipulates us. By rarely speaking, we’re all desperate for interviews. He grants them only on his terms. There is a lot of pressure to stay on his good side to be one of the coveted few granted an audience. I spent 18 months writing a book about Bezos without ever managing to get an interview with anyone at the company. This doesn’t seem like the kind of person to run a news business.

Will The Washington Post get more access to Amazon now? Not likely. Will the public, competitors and watchdog organizations seek out new biases in the Post’s coverage? Most certainly. Even if the allegations are not true, perception is important to a publication.

There is, however, a very positive alternative to this story. As a businessman, Bezos is interested in figuring out new ways to make money online. He has reason to be interested in the Post. There is enormous opportunity in the business.

The problem in the news business (and at The Washington Post in particular) is not the ability to collect reporting and write the news. The industry knows how to do that. Bezos has no incentive, and no reason, to get involved with this side of the business. If he damages the Post’s editorial integrity, he could kill the company and his investment. He’s too smart to waste money like that.

The problem in journalism is figuring out how to make money at it. The Internet has changed the business model of media companies. New paradigm-shifting technologies always do that to existing businesses. This time, it’s the journalism industry’s turn.

Eventually, however, smart entrepreneurs figure out how to adapt. Many old companies do not, and die off. Bezos is a “new paradigm” kind of guy, an Internet pioneer. What he can do is figure out how to make a newspaper profitable in the digital age. At least, we hope so.

That ambition goes far beyond The Washington Post. By buying the company and learning the revenue-generating side of the business, he may figure out a new, Internet-centric road to profitability. If it works at the Post, it might work for the entire industry. He doesn’t have to own every newspaper in order to help them change their business models; he just needs to show them the way. He could disrupt the entire industry, we hope in a positive way.

And here’s where Amazon comes back into the picture. Bezos’s new business model will most certainly involve Amazon in the retail channel. Bezos has made it clear that he wants to own as much of the business of doing business on the Internet as possible. That’s why he created the Kindle, following the pioneering ideas of Steve Jobs. With the Kindle, he can put media in your hands.

Newspapers are dying: Classifieds are gone, print ads are drying up, and subscribers are dwindling. Few outlets have figured out how to persuade readers to pay for content. Nobody yet knows exactly what the new business model or models may be. But if anyone can come up with one, it’s likely to be Jeff Bezos.

That is the great news in all of this. Imagine a press-shy CEO like Bezos playing a key role in reviving the journalism business. That might be bad news for some: Bezos cares about customers, and that means low prices for quality products. Not many book publishers or offline bookstores appreciate Amazon’s dominance of the bookselling business. Newspaper executives may have similar problems.

Bezos may not be a journalism idealist, but those of us who are can only applaud the possibility that he is successful in finding a way to make it profitable. George Guthrie, a press photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play, “Night and Day,” may have said it best. After a long exploration of the importance and failings of the press, Guthrie sums it up near the end.

“I’ve been around a lot of places. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. It really is. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light. That’s all you can say, really.”

Jeff Bezos is no saint. But as a businessman, he may end up helping to shed more light on the world.

Richard L. Brandt is a freelance technology/business journalist and author of One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com .